2
The Radical South
Politics and the Lesbian Feminist Imaginary
Coming Out in the South
It was big news when the Human Rights Campaign, the biggest gay rights organization in the country, announced that it was starting a multimillion-dollar initiative in three southern states: Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. The investment of money and time in a region long considered, in the words of a Daily Kos article about the initiative, the “very heart of our homophobic Mordor”1 marked a new moment in national gay political organizing.
The executive director of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Arkansas native Chad Griffin, and Academy Award–winning screenwriter (and Texas native) Dustin Lance Black visited the University of Mississippi in the fall of 2014 as part of the “One America” initiative. Their message was essentially the same one the gay rights movement has been emphasizing since the time of Harvey Milk: come out. Telling their own coming-out stories, Griffin and Black suggested the same happy ending: if we all come out, we will transform our home states and the homophobia that continues to reign in our legislatures.
I knew a number of people in the audience who had already come out, bravely and at potentially great personal cost in a state where there is no protection from employment and housing discrimination. My friend Stacey Harkins had become a marriage equality activist after travelling to New York to marry Anna, registering their license in the Lafayette County courthouse, giving interviews in print and on camera, and otherwise embodying the ethos of coming out. A feature on the anything-but-liberal hottytoddy.com website foregrounded their insistence on claiming both southern and gay identities.
They are aware that Mississippi does not recognize them as a couple, but they do not let that define their relationship.
“People have told us, ‘If you don’t like our laws, just leave.’ But Anna and I were both born and raised in Mississippi. We are both second generation Ole Miss graduates,” Stacey said. “When we planned our wedding in New York, we still planned it around the Ole Miss football game. I don’t understand how people can discriminate against us, but I really don’t understand who has a wedding on a football game day! Ha!” …
“We work and pay our bills and go to dinner with our friends and spoil our schnauzer, Andy, rotten,” Stacey said. “We eat at Ajax, support our Rebels, and love Oxford just like anyone else. This is our state, too. We love Oxford. We love the people and the land that generations of our family members have chosen as their home.”2
Gay marriage had been pushed to the forefront of the national conversation by ordinary citizens like Stacey and Anna, residents of flyover states who wanted the practical protections marriage could afford them and were willing to hire lawyers to claim their rights as citizens. It is easy to forget now that national groups like the HRC wanted nothing to do with gay marriage in the 1990s and were annoyed that these lawsuits kept forcing them to take a stand. Through marriage equality, Americans discovered that their neighbors were gay and lesbian when they lined up for licenses across the nation. Many queer southerners were already out—and some resented hearing a simplistic, celebratory narrative that suggested coming out would automatically transform the region.
By the end of 2017 the HRC could not point to any legislative victories in Jackson, Mississippi; the governor had not altered his homophobic rhetoric, despite widespread rumors that his own son is gay.3 The passage in the spring of 2016 of HB 1523—by far the most far-reaching antigay legislation in the country, framed by “religious freedom”—suggests that the Obergefell backlash trumped the sunny coming-out narrative of Griffin and Black. Indeed, the HRC’s most inspiring work in Mississippi has been done by Denise Donnell, Rob Hill, and Daniel Ball, who have built partnerships with Mississippi’s church communities. Convincing some of the churches in the state to tone down their rhetoric and reach out to needy communities, including homeless LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) youth, could make an enormous difference in a state where tirades against gay marriage and gay equality often make life unbearable for LGBTQ citizens and the friends and family who love them. Grassroots gay rights organizations have similarly emphasized religious communities as a site to wage the battle for gay equality.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about the HRC investment in the South was the suggestion that this sort of intervention was brand new; it is not. Queer feminist radical activism thrived in the South since the 1970s, emphasizing intersectional and coalition politics. Framing the South as “the heart of our homophobic Mordor” has a long history; the South is usually figured in contemporary discourse as a reactionary no-man’s-land, a space so mired in tradition and averse to change that it is dragging down the nation. And obviously, evidence for this view abounds—an abundance of Republican governors, the rejection of the Affordable Care Act, the public denunciation of Syrian refugees, and the steady stream of legislation restricting abortion rights and discriminating against queer citizens.
But the lived reality has always been more complicated. Southern studies scholars have been arguing for decades that the South is more an ideology than a real place, a hegemony of heritage that has made a certain version of history, obsessed with the Confederacy and the nostalgia of the Lost Cause, a litmus test for “authentic” southernness. This test has always excluded a majority of actual residents of the South, then and now; its power depends on willful un-remembering. Specifically, it depends on commemorating the South as conservative while ignoring its ongoing relationship with radical political movements.
Perhaps the best known example of radical politics was the drive to end racial segregation in the South. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement was clearly southern, rooted in Christianity and the tradition of black southern Baptists. But so too was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), started by southern African American students at a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. The SNCC organized some of the most dramatic events of the early 1960s, including the Freedom Rides. Its strategy of using white northerners to increase the visibility of the movement and prompt the federal government to take action (as it did during Freedom Summer) was constructed and debated by a core of southern radical students.4
Less remembered are other political movements that grew out of the civil rights movement: African American activism focused on the sexual assault of black women by white men;5 the beginnings of the black power movement in Lowndes County, Alabama;6 and early feminist organizing.7 The SNCC also had far-reaching effects: their systematic campaign to register to vote black Mississippians across the state, in communities large and small, and to introduce new ideas through Freedom Schools and the Free Southern Theater was an almost military-style operation to retake the territory occupied by Jim Crow, in both physical space and the southern imaginary. This focus on culture and liberated consciousness for black southerners continued through the 1960s and 1970s through the black arts movement.8
Go back to the early nineteenth century and you find radical southerners everywhere. They lived in maroon societies formed by groups of escaped slaves in the Carolinas and Florida;9 they plotted slave uprisings;10 they escaped to the North and spoke on the abolitionist lecture circuit;11 they turned against their own planter families and adopted the mixed-race children of their relatives;12 they rioted against the Confederate government.13 Whatever percentage of the population they comprised (and if one includes enslaved Africans along with abolitionists, Unionists, and deserters, that percentage is considerable), they succeeded in dramatically redefining the economy, American citizenship, and the Constitution during Reconstruction. The period following the Civil War saw the most radical reinvention of citizenship and governance ever attempted in the United States, greater than even the New Deal. The southern denunciation of that era, epitomized by Birth of a Nation, has hidden its successful radicalism, which was first recuperated by W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1930 Black Reconstruction and more recently in scholarship by Eric Foner, Douglas Egerton, and Allen Guelzo.14 More than 1,500 African Americans held legislative office during the period; Reconstruction’s insistence on creating an equitable interracial democracy inspired both the counterreaction of Jim Crow and the subsequent civil rights movement.
Still other examples of radicalism simmer under the surface in southern history. Robyn D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe details the almost forgotten history of black Communists in the South, who continued to exert influence from the Scottsboro trial to the broadcasts (from Cuba) of Radio Free Dixie to anti-Klan organizing in the 1980s.15 At the same time, the New Deal created conditions that allowed the rise of organized labor in the South, which destabilized efforts by southern politicians to take money from federal programs while enforcing segregation. In textile mills, loading docks, coalfields, and tobacco factories, thousands of southerners went on strike for fair wages; their organizing would later feed the civil rights movement.16
We keep forgetting these eruptions of the radical South in our literature and our history, but they inform the southern lesbian feminist writers of The Lesbian South. History was crucial to their understanding of themselves as feminists and southerners, and that buried history provided the key to their own radicalizations.
(Lesbian) Feminist Activism and the South
Women’s liberation activism in the South has also been largely overlooked. The 2014 special issue of Sinister Wisdom, “Southern Lesbian-Feminist Herstory 1968–1994,” documents the wide range of feminist activism in the South during the first twenty-five years of the women’s liberation movement in the United States. Rose Norman points out that in 1968, one of the twenty women invited to attend the “first national women’s liberation organizing meeting,” Judith Brown, was from Gainesville, Florida. Brown had coauthored one of the most influential early women’s liberation documents, “Toward a Female Liberation Movement,” known as the “Florida Paper.”17 Brown returned home from the meeting and formed Gainesville Women’s Liberation, the first women’s liberation group in the South (16). Two members of the New York Redstockings, Carol Hanisch and Kathie Sarachild, moved to Gainesville in 1969 (“at least part-time,” says Norman). Sarachild wrote “the first pamphlet on principles of feminist consciousness-raising (CR) groups” in Gainesville, and Hanisch “wrote the famous essay ‘The Personal Is Political’ while living in Gainesville” (16). Gainesville, in other words, generated some of the most important concepts and publications of early women’s liberation, and southerners were central to women’s liberation from its earliest iteration.
This is not how women’s liberation has been commemorated, as a number of southern scholars have pointed out. Even Rose Norman, “a lifelong Southerner … involved in feminism since the 1970s,” didn’t know about “the significance of Gainesville, Florida, in the women’s movement” (16). Southerners tend to be left out of these national narratives, or their locations or origins are elided. Many feminists moved to New York and Washington, D.C., Connecticut and California, Oregon and Illinois, but they never ceased to identify as southerners, to engage with the South imaginatively and emotionally, and to live as expatriates who might at any moment go “home.” But not all southern feminists were expatriates, as the “Herstory” issue makes clear. The oral histories in Sinister Wisdom map a wide feminist campaign in the South involving university towns and urban centers, women’s communes, and underground communities. Oral histories from Gainesville, Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, and Kentucky, Mississippi, and North Carolina suggest the geographic scope of southern feminist activism. From the creation of women’s resource centers and women’s studies programs on university campuses to the establishment of battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers to legal battles over reproductive rights, domestic violence, rape laws, custody of children, child care, and the Equal Rights Amendment, southern feminists were involved the full range of what have commonly been understood as “women’s issues.”18 They were also involved, simultaneously, in issues of economic inequality, mass incarceration, animal welfare, and what we now call “critical race studies.”
Scholarship on southern feminist movements has increased in the last ten years.19 The Lesbian South contributes to this growing body of knowledge by investigating the intersectional focus of the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Southern lesbian feminists were not the only voices advocating radical critiques and solutions, of course, but they were prominent in women’s liberation. Blanche McCrary Boyd suggested in her 1998 retrospective novel about women’s liberation, Terminal Velocity, that southerners made particularly good radicals: “ ‘There’s nobody better than a Southern white girl who gets liberated,’ a well-known black militant had told me, leaning his face down close to mine, repeating almost word for word the line a white SDS leader from Wisconsin had used a few months before. Southern white girls, their theory seemed to go, grew up with such crazy, restrictive notions of feminine behavior that when we broke out, we broke out completely. ‘Outlaws with charm,’ the SDS man said, then asked me if my house was one of those big white mansions with columns.”20 This stereotype of southern “bad girls” is problematic, to say the least, as it assumes a certain version of white planter-class femininity, defined by Scarlett O’Hara; nonwhite and working-class southerners are excluded. Southern feminine norms come up again and again in the archive of southern lesbian feminism as something toxic to be deconstructed and moved past.
As lesbians, these southern writers placed themselves beyond the boundaries of “acceptable” southern ladyhood. Minnie Bruce Pratt is a case in point.21 She describes herself as a femme former sorority girl who enjoyed all the benefits of traditional southern femininity. When she was older she recognized that chivalric protection was also a cage, when she lost custody of her children after coming out as a lesbian. The fragility of her racial and class privilege led to greater insights:
If I have begun to understand that I am entrapped as a woman, not just by the sexual fears of the men of my group, but also by their racial and religious terrors; if I have begun to understand that when they condemn me as a lesbian and a free woman for being “dirty,” “unholy,” “perverted,” “immoral,” it is a judgment they have called down on people of color and Jews throughout history, as the men of my culture have shifted their justification for hatred according to their desires of the moment; if I have begun to understand something of the deep connection between my oppression and that of other folks, what is it that keeps me from acting, sometimes even from speaking out?22
That “deep connection” of oppression—of racial and religious intolerance, and the ways that accusations of “perversion” serve to keep those others in their place—helped Pratt to critique the injustices of her southern upbringing. This intersectional critique marks the archive of southern lesbian feminism. Those excluded from the myth of the southern belle, notable southerners of color and working-class southerners, felt less investment in ladyhood but approached their politics in a similarly intersectional way. Deconstructing the status quo led to complex radical coalitions.
Minnie Bruce Pratt also challenged the legacy of the Fugitives, whose values were “love of the land and denial of those who had done the work on the land, despair and a belief in death, a fascination with the past of the old heroes, a failure to understand the new heroes and heroines who were liberating the present.”23 But the Fugitives also taught Pratt about the power of words to create new realities, new political configurations, new mythologies. This belief in the creative power of literature had immediate practical and political aims as well. Southern lesbian feminist writers, like the Fugitives, already considered themselves to be outside the American mainstream, and they understood the power and resistance of a community of outsiders. Why couldn’t their own literary visions, supported by independent presses, create a new South, a better South? The archive of southern lesbian feminism imagined a radical South full of deviants and race traitors and carpetbaggers and racial, cultural, and sexual others, empowered in a system that supports them. Some wrote these creations from afar; others worked for change in the South, in protests and activism. This radical South took many forms and engaged multiple political issues, but it made cultural rebellion and intersectionality central to a southern lesbian feminist imaginary.
Radical Politics and the (Southern) Lesbian Feminist Imaginary in Early Women’s Liberation
A number of southern lesbian feminists were involved in early feminist activism. June Arnold was a member of the Fifth Street Women’s Building takeover; Pat Parker was involved in a number of actions in the Bay Area, supporting victims of domestic violence and parental rights for lesbian mothers; Blanche McCrary Boyd lived in a Vermont radical commune and helped organize the Sagaris Feminist Institute; Rita Mae Brown organized a number of notorious political actions including the Lavender Menace action at NOW and the presentation of the “Woman-Identified Woman” at another feminist gathering; Mab Segrest worked in anti-Klan activism; Minnie Bruce Pratt protested the Supreme Court after the Hardwick decision in 1986; Alice Walker participated in civil rights activism in Mississippi in the 1960s; Dorothy Allison ran a women’s center in Tallahassee in the 1970s; even Fannie Flagg, not a particularly political person, signed a petition in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Politics was the air they breathed, and 1960s radicalism—particularly antiwar protests and nationalist groups like the Black Panthers—informed their provocations. The southern lesbian feminist writers of this study manifested their radical politics in a host of political issues, and their embrace of cultural forms to explore them and change “consciousness” in their readers was of a piece with the consciousness-raising groups that motivated direct political action.
This flexible focus on radical politics and consciousness raising through art is apparent in some of the earliest women’s poetry of the period. Poetry readings united nascent feminist communities at feminist bookstores and coffeehouses, and many southern lesbian feminist writers got their starts writing poetry. There were two national stars in the earliest days of this egalitarian feminist poetry movement—Rita Mae Brown and Pat Parker.
Brown’s early collection The Hand that Cradles the Rock contains numerous references to the pressing “women’s issues” of her day, and it was a touchstone for early women’s liberationists. The book depicts the contemporary world of the patriarchy, a male culture that is sick and dying. The title of the opening poem makes this clear: “On the Rooftop Where All the Pigeons Go to Die: A Litany for Male Culture.” She embeds images of decay and the sea in a repetition of the word before: “before great hulks of decomposed intelligence / bobbled on the Hudson flowing endlessly,” “Before universities and warmakers fed off each other like incestuous crabs.”24 The longing for a lost, prepatriarchal culture takes an unexpected turn when she notes the “sunken temple of Jupiter’s ancient encrusted marble maze” (13). Those familiar with Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” will note similar themes here; “male culture” is already doomed in Brown’s poem. She dismisses “Radical Man” as nothing more than “A marvelous me of malevolence” (16).
Brown’s “triptych” “The New Lost Feminist” garnered considerable attention in the feminist journal the Furies when it was first published in 1971, and Coletta Reid’s long appreciation of the poem was reprinted in her introduction to the Diana Press reprint of The Hand that Cradles the Rock: “The left panel is the expression of the deep personal frustration, powerlessness and suffering of a woman.… The center panel gives the societal picture … America is dying.… But before the end comes, the cause of death is made clear: the demise of the system was part of the nature of the system itself.… The right panel is a recognition of what has been done to us by the society and what we have to do about it.”25 From the poem’s dramatic start—“A woman is dying for want of a single unrealized word, / Freedom” (23)—through images of “blacks, / Women and the young / Fleeing a Troy that has built its own horse / America becomes a bloated corpse” (24) to its final call to action—“It’s time to break and run” (25)—Brown allows for no compromise with “America’s rotting rib cage [that] frames the gallows / Of her putrid goals” (24).
The apocalyptic images of what we now call “heteropatriarchy” are relentless. In a play on Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” Brown describes “leav[ing] in wider and wider circles / Turning to where the center should be, Amerika,” and ends: “You find him, syphilitic whore / An international festering sore” (35). And she is at no loss for specific examples: the dry irrelevance of universities, the brutality of repression. In another poem from The Hand that Cradles the Rock, “Hymn to the 10,000 Who Die Each Year on the Abortionist’s Table in Amerika,” Brown insists on remembering the dead through making “death masks” and touching “the crevices of the slain faces/ For slivers of truth” (40). The spelling Amerika suggests an America wounded by racism (the KKK) as well as a German allusion that may imply a fascist state; in using this language, Brown is similar to a number of New Left writers. She concludes, “Though painful in its pushing / We must hunt as wounded women / The balm to heal one another” (40). Another poem, “For Lydia French, Shot and Killed, August 13, 1970,” condemns domestic violence: “Women know / Women have always known / As marrow to the bone / Death is at the heart of men. / I touch your solitary, senseless death / and run for my life. / Men shall yet know / The fruits earned / Of death. / Goodbye, Lydia” (58). She touches on the issue of mass incarceration with images of the women’s prison located in Greenwich Village, the Women’s House of Detention: “Here amid the nightsticks, handcuffs and interrogation / Inside the cells, beatings, the degradation / We grew a strong and bitter root / That promises justice” (67). As in her political essays (collected in A Plain Brown Rapper), Brown connected women’s issues to a variety of radical political causes.
In San Francisco, Houston native Pat Parker was also building up an impressive following.26 Her early poetry published by the Women’s Press Collective includes saucy rebukes to various lovers, activists, and strangers, and criticizes America and the South as fascist, movement brothers for their sexism, feminist sisters for their racism and homophobia, and fellow lesbians for their racism. Unlike Rita Mae Brown’s poetry, Parker’s work is often very funny. (Brown saved her humor for her fiction.) Parker’s humor often softens the sting of her pointed poetic critiques. The poems from her 1973 collection Pit Stop show her wry wit. “For Willyce,” a poem about having sex with her girlfriend, finishes with a commentary on patriarchy: “When I make love to you … / & your sounds drift down /oh god! / oh jesus! / and i think— / here it is, some dude’s / getting credit for what / a woman / has done, / again.”27 Themes of invisible women’s work abound in earlier women’s liberation, but there are no poems as naughty and witty as Pat Parker’s. In “The What Liberation Front?,” she includes a humorous satire on “liberation” political rhetoric by including her dog’s critique of her own oppression.
Today I had a talk with my dog
he called me a racist—chauvinist person
told me he didn’t like the way
i keep trying to change him.…
And property—he wanted to know why
people expected dogs to protect their capitalist interest
he never watches television or plays
records. & how come I put tags on him.
My dog—he laughed. He is his own dog.
And what’s this bullshit about his sex
life. If he wants to fuck in the streets it’s
his business.28
The poem is printed with a facing-page photograph of Parker kneeling and her dog, standing on his hind legs, towering over her with his paws on her shoulders, and it ends with the dog going to a “consciousness-raising meeting.” This poem shows a sense of humor about the conventions of identity politics in 1973 that we don’t usually give lesbian feminists credit for. But how should we read this poem? She clearly isn’t dismissing the principles of “liberation”; indeed, she doesn’t mind Marxist critiques of dogs (and wives) as “property.” Recent scholarship on the queer nonhuman that argues that distinctions between humans and other animals mirror hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality would embrace much of the sentiment behind this funny poem.29 Indeed, the disturbing colonial rhetorical tradition of framing Africans as animals to justify slavery comes under critique in this dismissal of animals as property. And Parker’s implicit support of “fucking in the streets” might also be embraced by queer studies’ investigations of public sex.30 Parker’s seemingly simple poetry is actually extraordinarily nuanced and layered and performs often dangerous critiques of normative American society.
Other poems by Parker continue this theme of seemingly simple structure and complicated intersectional critiques. The opening poem of Pit Stop, “My Lover Is a Woman,”31 is a good example:
1
My lover is a woman
& when i hold her—
feel her warmth—
i feel good—feel safe
then i never think of
my families’ voices—
never hear my sisters say—
bulldaggers, queers, funny—
come see us, but don’t
bring your friends—
it’s okay with us,
but don’t tell mama
it’d break her heart
never feel my father
turn in his grave
never hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this?
2
My lover’s hair is blonde
& when it rubs across my face
it feels soft—
feels like a thousand fingers
touch my skin & hold me
and i feel good.
Then i never think of the little boy
who spat & called me nigger
never think of the policemen
who kicked my body and said crawl
never think of black bodies
hanging in trees or filled
with bullet holes
never hear my sisters say
white folks hair stinks
don’t trust any of them
never feel my father
turn in his grave
never hear my mother talk
of her back ache after scrubbing floors
never hear her cry—
Lord, what kind of child is this?
3
My lover’s eyes are blue
& when she looks at me
i float in a warm lake
feel my muscles go weak with want
feel good—feel safe
Then—i never think of the blue
eyes that have glared at me—
moved three stools away from me
in a bar
never hear my sisters rage
of syphilitic black men as
guinea pigs—
rage of sterilized children—
watch them just stop in an
intersection to scare the old
white bitch
never feel my father turn
in his grave
never remember my mother
teaching me the yes sirs & mams
to keep me alive—
never hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this?
4
And when we go to a gay bar
& my people shun me because I crossed
the line
& her people look to see what’s
wrong with her—what defect
drove her to me—
and when we walk the streets
of this city—forget and touch
or hold hands and the people
stare, glare, frown, & taunt
at those queers—
I remember
Every word taught me
Every word said to me
Every deed done to me
& then i hate
i look at my lover
& for an instant—doubt—
Then—i hold her hand tighter
And i can hear my mother cry.
Lord, what kind of child is this.
The structure is deceptively simple—from observations about her white lover to the hauntings of her own traumatic experiences, culminating in the refrain about her parents, “Lord, what kind of child is this?”—but Parker weaves a complicated vision of cultural interpellation here. She switches focus from one form of prejudice to another within a stanza, even within a line. Her sisters go from being victims of “syphilitic black men” to terrorizing a white woman, without any transition. There is no simple identity as either victim or oppressor, no stance that makes one immune to this hate. The repetitions of “my lover is a woman” and “what kind of child is this?” reveal racism within queer communities; homophobia within black communities; white supremacy and its devastating consequences in the black community; and the painful rejection by her family. A personal love story cannot transcend the complicated structural limitations that thwart an interracial lesbian couple.
Ultimately, Parker is concerned with how this hostile cultural environment affects her own psyche and identity. One way she explores the infection of cultural hate is through form. Like many of her other poems, “My Lover Is a Woman” capitalizes the first word of each sentence and the “Lord” of the last line, and leaves the rest lower case. In the the second-to-last stanza, when the narrator allows her cultural marginality to drive her to doubt her lover and her own experience, she capitalizes every line, perhaps to symbolize the hateful cultural mode that has infected her. She retreats away from this standard position in the final stanza, and rewrites her mother’s lament. Instead of “my mother cries, Lord, what kind of child is this,” she writes “i can hear my mother cry,” ending the thought with a period. Her final line, “Lord, what kind of child is this” also ends with a period, not a question mark, and becomes, rather than her mother’s homophobic lament, her own somber mediation on how to resist a hateful, destructive culture.
In this poem, Parker is haunted by her southern childhood—images of lynching, of police violence, of her mother’s servitude in white homes, and of her own subservience as she is taught “the yes sirs & mams / to keep me alive” as a second-class citizen. Other poems by Parker juxtapose a Jim Crow South against the idealistic claims of a free America, foregrounding her own distinctive positionality as a black southerner. She often focuses on a racist, militarized presence, as in her poem “Tour America.” Parker considers safety on a potential road trip, but every remedy requires another protection from the previous one: “there are things I need: / travelers checks in new york / gas mask in berkeley, / face mask in los angeles, / National guardsmen to protect me/ - in the south, / Marines to protect me / from guardsmen / - in the mid-west, / Police to protect me / from hustlers/ - in the ghettos, / Bullet-proof vest and helmet / to protect me from police / -everywhere.”32 Parker packs a number of cultural references into this short poem—political protests in Berkeley, the Kent State massacre, civil rights protests in the South, and the ongoing specter of police brutality across the United States. The complexity of oppression in the United States means that no one solution is right; protectors in one context become oppressors in another. Following a reference to the venality of the police everywhere, Parker concludes the poem with her most revolutionary sentiment yet: “perhaps,/ it would be better/ to blow it up.”
Parker has a complicated relationship to the South in her poetry. As an expatriate, she had already voted with her feet; she rejects the subordinate legacy of African American manners and a legal system that defined her as a second-class citizen. In her poem “Her children arise up, and call her blessed.…”, from the 1978 collection Womanslaughter, Parker considers another southern legacy she rejected as a young girl—saying “sir” and “mam,” a practice intimately tied to an apartheid system.
when i was a child
i was punished—
i refused to say
yes sir & yes mam.…
now, my mother
is dying
& i wish to say
so much,
to thank her
to say—i love you
to hold her in my arms.
these things
i cannot do
we have too
many years
of not touching—
of not saying.…
i am afraid of death
fear to touch a cold body
yet, i know
in the final viewing,
i will lean over my mother
& whisper in her ear—
yes mam, mama, yes mam.33
Parker’s careful evocation of her mother’s physical and emotional distancing finds an unexpected resolution when she bestows a southern mark of respect on her mother (which neither of them would have received in their native Houston). Revolutionary egalitarianism meets her southern background in a particularly moving way in this poem.
Parker reclaims the South in “To My Vegetarian Friend,” too, when she rebukes a vegetarian with a paean to southern African American foodways:
It’s not called soul food
because it goes with music.
it is a survival food.…
And when I sit—
faced by
chitterlins & greens
neckbones & tails
it is a ritual—
it is a joining—
me to my ancestors
& your words ring untrue
this food is good for me
it replenishes my soul.34
Parker’s insistence on “soul food” as “survival food” connects southern cooking to a mystical communion with a slave past and an African one (something that has become an emphasis in Southern Foodways Scholarship35). Soul food becomes a kind of sacrament that is superior to the vegetarian dogmatism popular among Bay Area lesbians.
Parker’s focus on complex intersectional issues, however, doesn’t prevent her from pointedly criticizing the patriarchy. The title poem in Womanslaughter, a heartrending account of her own sister’s murder by her husband and the court’s reduction of the charge to manslaughter, is an extended critique of how the killing of women is accepted, even celebrated, in a misogynist culture. Forty years after its publication, the poem is still a devastating indictment of a system in which “womenslaughter” is endemic. Parker’s sister was failed by the police and the justice system. The police said, “Lady, there’s nothing we can do / until he tried to hurt you.”36 In court, lawyers suggested she was a slut and a lesbian, his white boss vouched for him, and he was given one year for manslaughter. Parker exposes how, in a patriarchal America, womanslaughter is the prerogative of every man, even those subordinated by race and class: “What was his crime? / He only killed his wife / But a divorce i say. / Not final, they say; / Her things were his / including her life. / Men cannot rape their wives. / Men cannot kill their wives. / They passion them to death.”37 The realization that womanslaughter is foundational to patriarchal culture is the chilling and unavoidable conclusion drawn from this particular familial grief.
The poem’s final paragraph merges into a cross-racial appeal to “sisterhood”:
The three sisters
of Shirley Jones
came & cremated her.
& they were not strong.
Hear me now—
It is almost three years
& I am again strong.
I have gained many sisters
And if one is beaten,
or raped, or killed,
I will not come in mourning black
I will not pick the right flowers.
I will not celebrate her death
& it will matter not
if she’s Black or white—
if she loves women or men.
I will come with my many sisters
and decorate the streets
with the innards of those
brothers in womenslaughter
No more, can I dull my rage
in alcohol & deference
to men’s courts.
I will come to my sisters,
not dutiful
I will come strong.38
Parker universalizes the theme of her poem in the end, shifting from her literal sisters—the “sisters of Shirley Jones”—to her feminist sisters, of all races and sexual orientations. Parker’s unflinching indictment of fellow feminists for sexism and racism does not mitigate their unity against a common foe—in this case, the structural violence of a patriarchal system. Her proposed response to that system is vigilante vengeance: to “decorate the streets with the innards of those brothers in womenslaughter.” That violent radical solution recurs in a number of Parker’s poems.
This simultaneous embrace of radical critique, coalition politics, and disreputable femininity also appears in writings by other southern lesbian feminists. Rita Mae Brown’s essays, for example, critique figures of the mainstream feminist movement—the Betty Friedans, the Kate Millets—and praise the sort of women who weren’t supposed to be involved in women’s liberation: “the women who won’t make a mockery of the word Liberation … women who trust deeds not the promise of then … poor women, Black women, Puerto Rican women, Asian-American women, working women and women who love their sisters … women who will bypass rhetoric and make a revolution.”39 Early women’s liberationists like Brown were “question[ing] the basic structure of our nation,”40 and many were deeply suspicious of the priorities of white, middle-class reformers. Indeed, Brown states in the introduction to her collected essays: “By now, thanks to those early anti-lesbian campaigns, we’ve all learned to mistrust a mystique of unity which comes at the expense and silence of minority women. Women who are safely white aren’t going to be quiet about it, nor are poor women, nor are lesbians. Lesbianism was the first issue to break ideological ground on the real meaning of multiplicity rather than conformity. Because of that initial, bitter struggle I hope the issues of class and white bias can be handled with more maturity than any of us handled the lesbian issue.”41 Particularly important in critiques of sexuality and heteronormativity was the trope of the revolutionary lesbian, a queer figure who allowed for a broad appraisal of the role of sexuality in contemporary American culture. But lesbian identity, for many southern-identified lesbian feminists, also served as an impetus for coming to terms with multiple differences among women. That was especially true in the intimate connection of feminism and antiracism in the archive of southern lesbian feminism.
Intersectional Analysis, Antiracism, and Cross-Racial Organizing in the Lesbian Feminist South
For southern lesbian feminists, race was not something that was later “added” to feminism; it was always an essential part of their understanding of their region and their identities. Many southern lesbian feminist writers came to feminism through civil rights activism and continued antiracist work as a key part of their feminism. The best known of these activists is Alice Walker, and though she didn’t publicly claim lesbian feminism (or even identify as a lesbian, despite writing one of the most famous depictions of a lesbian relationship in The Color Purple), her voice is essential in reckoning with the alignment of civil rights and feminism. Walker lived in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s with a Jewish husband who worked as a lawyer for the NAACP. Her involvement with Ms. magazine and with feminism (or womanism, as she called it in her germinal essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens) connected civil rights activism and feminism in palpable ways. In Gardens, she laid claim to the South as an African American and a radical, in terms that defined a whole generation of Southern lesbian feminists: “Those red hills of Georgia were mine, and nobody was going to force me away from them until I myself was good and ready to go.… No black person I knew had ever encouraged anybody to ‘Go back to Mississippi …,’ and I knew if this challenge were taken up by the millions of blacks who normally left the South for better fortunes in the North, a change couldn’t help but come.… We would fight to stay where we were born and raised and destroy the forces that sought to disinherit us. We would proceed with the revolution from our own homes.”42 Walker’s decision to “proceed with the revolution from our own homes” resonated with many southern lesbian feminists. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens was one of many southern lesbian feminist texts in the 1980s that linked antiracism and feminism.
The next year, Cris South’s novel Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses considered the connection between anti-Klan activism and feminism. The epigraph to the novel comes from Pat Parker’s essay “Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,” which places the Klan in a systemic feminist critique of a patriarchal society: “The Klan and the Nazis are our enemies and must be stopped, but to simply mobilize around stopping them is not enough. They are functionaries, tools of this governmental system. They serve in the same way as our armed forces and police. To end Klan or Nazi activity doesn’t end imperialism. It doesn’t end institutional racism; it doesn’t end sexism; it does not bring this monster down, and we must not forget what our goals are and who our enemies are. To simply label these people as lunatic fringes and not accurately assess their roles as part of this system is a dangerous error.”43 South frames her novel within a systemic critique of contemporary culture and refuses to consider the Klan an aberration; for South, the Klan is emblematic of a racist patriarchy.
The main character of Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses, Jessie, gets a brutal education about the function of white male power. Her sexual coming out—she has sex with a woman for the first time only twelve pages into the novel—is connected to her political coming out. When she dismisses reports about Klan activity as “silly,” her business partner, Laura, teaches her southern history:
Let me give you a little piece of reality to think about. In the early 1900s, my grandfather and grandmother bought fifteen acres of land in northern Georgia. They were farmers. The Klan paid them a visit. They burned my grandfather’s house to the ground and rode through all the crops. Two years later, because my grandparents wouldn’t leave, they came back. They burned the place again. They tore up the crops. But this time, they beat my grandfather and left him a cripple for life. He was a young man with a wife and five kids. They had to move into town and my grandmother had to do maid’s work to support the family. Some local white men visited my grandfather and told him that they had heard there was some mischief brewing, but they hadn’t taken it seriously. Mischief! Then those good-intentioned white men offered to buy granddaddy’s land from him. They bought it for twenty-five cents on the dollar.44
Laura suggests a seamless system of economic disparity constructed through violence—the shock troops do the terrorizing and the rich planter class scoops up the rewards. And though Laura’s story focuses on African Americans, Jessie soon learns that white people who break with white supremacy also face racial terror.
Jessie finds herself under surveillance. When she appears at a gas station wearing a “Stop the KKK” button, the owner “read the button out loud, and you could’ve heard a pin drop in there. All the men stared at me, and one guy came over and sort of leaned against the counter beside me, looking at me hard.… Just as I was leaving, David asked didn’t I rent that old farmhouse down at Ben Carpenter’s place.”45 They continue to watch her, and when Jessie is a witness to a murder at an anti-Klan demonstration, she becomes a direct target of harassment that includes the trashing of her home, the hanging of her dog, and hate speech written in letters and painted on her wall: queer, niggerlover. It culminates in Jessie’s grisly gang rape—an act of political terrorism intimately connected to the murder that prompted it.
That rape happens in the first third of the novel. The rest of the novel considers the aftermath of sexual and racial terror and how she not only survives but also resists it. Jessie discovers that no one in her circle is unaffected by sexual violence. Her own lover, Kate, was beaten by her father and raped by her brother; her best friend’s lover was gang raped; her business partner Laura was beaten; and Laura’s white lover, Moon, was shot and left for dead by the Klan in Mississippi in the 1960s. And the violence is not limited to her lesbian feminist circle; one of the rapists, Hank, a police officer, a Klan member, abuses his own wife, Beth, beating and raping her viciously.
The friends’ successful resistance is achieved through their support for one another and through the institutions they build. They nurse Jessie back to health, and it is Laura and Moon, the former civil rights activist, who discover the Klan members in the printing shop and prevent their escape from the police. Kate starts a battered women’s shelter, and when Hank’s wife escapes there, having finally found the courage to leave her husband, she corroborates Jessie’s rape charge and allows Jessie to regain control. A fellow police officer tells Hank where the shelter is (despite knowing that Hank has been arrested for arson and that his wife has left him), and when he appears, Jessie protects Beth, sinking a maul into the wall as she aims for his head, and leaving him whimpering in the corner as she swipes an ax inches from his face. “Lizzie Borden,”46 she says later, laughing, and this archetypal image of that murderous woman releases something in Jessie that cannot be taken away. The final scene of her celebration with her lesbian feminist community underlines their resolve: southern lesbian feminists will not be intimidated, and they will not be driven out of their communities.
Cris South was one of the key members of the Feminary collective, whose mission from 1978 to 1982 was to queer the South. The journal it produced, also called Feminary, made an excavation of the radical South central to its embrace of a multicultural lesbian feminist South. It framed itself as a distinctively southern, antiracist publishing forum that deconstructed a toxic, nostalgic South and created a just and inclusive one. That new South explicitly included women of color. The journal emphasized the voices of African Americans, all of whom had roots in the South, whether they themselves had lived there or not (thus Pratt included the writing of Kitchen Table Press founder Barbara Smith). These voices of black migration were central to Feminary’s southern vision, in memoirs, interviews, short stories, and poetry. Feminary also sought out Native American and Hispanic voices. It aimed to create new ways of remembering and defining, new maps, and new conceptions of the South. Feminary was an experiment in a truly intersectional analysis of a lesbian South, overseen primarily by white southern lesbian feminists but created by a diverse collective of lesbian feminist writers.
Nowhere was this emphasis clearer than in the collective’s final publication, a Feminary issue titled “The South as Home: Leaving or Staying,” which includes Raymina Mays’s short story “Delta,” detailing the narrator’s exile from her African American home because of her lesbianism,47 and a memoir about return to the South by Anita Cornwall, an African American lesbian feminist from Greenwood, South Carolina who wrote for TL.48 Almost all the writings by African Americans are stories of migration and displacement, a theme that runs through the issue. The issue also includes multiple maps, as if lesbian feminists must, literally, remap the territory to make it their own. On the back cover, one woman stands with arms akimbo (taking her stand, if you will) over the map of the South; another woman strides purposefully away from the map of the South, with only her ankle touching the tip of Florida as she moves out of the frame. The maps of the South on the cover have been modified from an earlier version to include half of Oklahoma and Texas—accommodating, perhaps, both Native American displacement and June Arnold’s inescapable shadow. Maps recur throughout the issue, overlaid with lists and bullet points detailing different radical histories. One emphasizes Native American displacement; others depict Jewish migration, African American traditions of resistance, and labor and the industries of the South. Each one transforms a seemingly known quantity.
Minnie Bruce Pratt comments on this remapping of the South in her poem “Reading Maps: Two,” which concludes the issue. She starts, “I have no map for the past,”49 because her mother has given her none: “About her life, mostly silence, a blank piece of paper. / I want to rip that up, useless guide to this land / we were both born and raised in, / the place I drive through now … on dirt paths once marked by Choctaws with painted trees, / past fields where, within her lifetime, good christian men / made bonfires, burned black folk like pine, while the women / lifted up the children to see.”50 A sense of violent haunting by the past, and its continued resonance in her present, continues throughout the poem. The “hidden road” marks a radical past and her own more recent queer rebellion:
I did not see
the hidden road, the one made in the dark blue sands,
the grey, brown, yellow red sands, the river sands
on the shore of an ancient sea,
the one made
by the feel of the Choctaw people wailing from
the Tombigbee …
made by the feet of the Ibo people stolen
from the land where they hoed their sweet yams, beans,
walking to chop cotton in strange fields at dawn51
Walking off the map and finding a new genealogy of knowledge grounded in native and African ways of knowing is central to Pratt’s, and Feminary’s, radical lesbian feminist vision.
Feminary lasted only four years as the vanguard of a multicultural lesbian feminist South, but it produced aftershocks that went on for over a decade. Cris South’s 1984 novel Clenched Fists, Burning Crosses, for example, was one result of the collective. In many ways, the careers of both Mab Segrest and Minnie Bruce Pratt demonstrate the importance of Feminary. Segrest’s 1985 collection of essays, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, was dominated by pieces that had first appeared in Feminary. The book was published by the newly formed Firebrand Books, founded by Nancy Bereano, which would publish a number of intersectional analyses about the South by lesbians including Mab Segrest and Maureen Brady (discussed below), as well as Dorothy Allison’s Trash and Pat Parker’s Movement in Black.
After Feminary folded, Segrest worked as an anti-Klan activist, partnering with civil rights organizations across North Carolina. Her 1995 book Memoir of a Race Traitor details this work. Coalitions, and her complicated decisions about how her own sexuality factored into her activism, drive the narrative. She explained the dynamic:
I had begun to feel pretty irregularly white. Klan folks had a word for it: race traitor. Driving in and out of counties with heavy Klan activity, I kept my eye on the rear-view mirror, and any time a truck with a Confederate flag license plate passed me, the hair on the back of my neck would rise. My reaction was more like the reactions of the Black people I was working with than of a white woman with three great-grandfathers in the Confederate Army.… I was in daily, intimate exposure to the cruel, killing effects of racism, which my Black friends spoke of in the same way that they commented on the weather, an equally constant factor in their lives. I often found myself hating all white people, including myself. As I took on racism, I also found its effects could be turned on me. The possibility of overt violence or the reality of subtle ostracism gave me a sense of shared risk, not the same as dangers faced by my friends of color, but close enough.52
Segrest describes how white antiracist activism weakened the privileges of white supremacy. The sense that white allies are not just traitors but inauthentically white circulates throughout the text. Segrest notes the links between racism and homophobia at the point in her narrative when white supremacists murdered men in an adult bookstore known to be a gay hangout and then set the bookstore on fire; the victims’ own families are hesitant to identify their loved ones as gay. Her careful interactions with those families shows her own complex understanding of the intersectionality of oppression:
As a lesbian, I had a lot personally invested in this case.… This time, the issue was not the Klan and racism; it was neo-Nazis and homophobia. My heart went out the Godfreys and the Meltons as they sorted through the information. Were the victims, their loved ones, gay? After hearing Dorlene’s vehemence and Fay’s questions, I knew this was not the issue. They were killed because their attackers perceived them to be gay. The perpetrators’ motive, rather than the victims’ identity, was the place to focus. But I couldn’t help wondering. Did the young men gathered that night at the Shelby III offer some window onto small-town life for homosexuals?53
Segrest’s queerness makes her more aware of the connection of racism and homophobia; queer bashing was a way to smear opponents of segregation, as Bayard Rustin and James Baldwin well knew. “Queers” and “nigger lovers,” as Cris South notes, often go together.
But Segrest is also careful (much more so than Rita Mae Brown, for example) to distinguish between these two kinds of oppression, noting that being queer doesn’t erase her white privilege but does make that privilege more tenuous. She also recognizes the challenge in persuading black communities to recognize homophobia as a linked issue; she often felt that she needed to hide her queerness. Memoir of a Race Traitor is a nuanced analysis that exemplifies Segrest’s careful work of intersectionality.
Minnie Bruce Pratt has an equally important cultural resonance, both for her work and for her long partnership with the transgender activist Leslie Feinberg. The amnesia of southern history was a constant theme in Pratt’s writing; she was raised in a South that insisted that nothing has changed, or can change. As she wrote in her collection of essays Rebellion: “To talk, to gossip, to complain, to raise your voice, to shout about what was happening to you or around you was useless; it was not reasonable; it was foolish, if not crazy, since the social order, the nature of people was set, doomed, and no amount of shouting would alter creation. It was not a possibility that talking about something would release a passion for change and thus bring about change.”54 Yet her insistence that history provided multiple models of radical transformation fuels her essays.
In one, Pratt writes about the erasure of the South’s radical past in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she was teaching:
I had no knowledge of any woman like me who had resisted and attempted to transform our home in preceding generations. I had no knowledge of other instances of struggle, whose example might have strengthened and inspired me in mine. For instance, I knew nothing of the nearby Lumbee Indians … who succeeded in the 1950s in breaking up Klan rallies and cross-burnings that had warned them to “keep their place.”
Even though I was teaching at an historically Black college, I had no understanding of the long tradition of Black culture and resistance in the town, a tradition which reached back before the Civil War, and which had produced Charles W. Chesnutt … author of novels that described the market house town, political organizing by Blacks, their massacre by whites during the 1898 Wilmington elections.… I knew nothing of the nourishing of Jewish culture in that hostile Bible Belt town, nor of Jewish traditions of resistance.… Nor that Carson McCullers, a woman very like me, living there in the 1930s, had written of the maddening, rigid effects of military life and thinking, and of the resistances of an Army wife.… Later I discovered Bertha Harris’ novel of being a lesbian lover, with extravagant stories that might have been told in that bar, being a passing woman in the Wilmington shipyard, being lovers with a movie star who had “hair like gold electricity,” hair like my lover’s hair, a book that was published the year I moved to the town that outrageous Bertha had long since grown up in and left.
I knew nothing of these or other histories of struggle for equality and justice and one’s own identity in the town I was living in.… It was a place with so many resistances, so much creative challenge to the powers of the world: which is true of every county, town, or city in this country, each with its own buried history of struggle, of how people try to maintain their dignity within the restrictions placed around them, and how they struggle to break those restrictions.55
Pratt’s extraordinarily detailed rewriting of the history of Fayetteville notes the layered history of Native American, African American, queer, and working-class southerners. Throwing Carson McCullers and Bertha Harris into this queer genealogy was an added bonus. Each southern community is a palimpsest, its radicalism willfully forgotten yet essential to the activist work Pratt embodies in the present. Other essays in Rebellion build on this legacy, demanding a complete rewriting of the history of South. Pratt’s encounters with family secrets and hidden queer enclaves create a South dramatically different from the conservative vision of the South that circulates in contemporary media.
Pratt addresses race (including African American and Native American history), sexuality, and class in her excavations of the South. Her discussions of class are particularly notable because these economic critiques are rare in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. (Rita Mae Brown included some Marxist references in her early poetry, but they seem pro forma and disappeared when she began to write fiction.) In one essay in Rebellion, Pratt argues that she
needed an economic history of my region, my country, that would have disclosed the irony and injustice of a state government doling out, through my mother, pitifully inadequate sums of money to women, and men, and their children, the sale of whose selves and whose slave labor, prison labor, hired-out convict labor, unpaid and underpaid domestic work, factory work, all kinds of work, had erected the white state, universities, houses, hospitals, factories, office buildings, fortunes. I would have had to understand that I had no knowledge of this economic analysis because there had been systematic and often violent state suppression of information and organization about class issues, from the beginning of our country until the most recent example—at that time the McCarthy purges. I would have had to see the red-baiting and Communist-hunting of McCarthy was based not on patriotism or love of democratic freedom, but on the assumption that capitalism is freedom.56
Maureen Brady’s novel Folly, discussed below, takes up this interlocking economic, racial, and sexual analysis of the South in a more sustained way, but Pratt’s awareness of the economic means of gender and racial oppression makes her writing a significant contribution.
Pratt’s interest in intersectional analysis also runs through her most lauded work, the Lamont Prize–winning poetry collection Crime against Nature. She links her own branding as a sexual other with the terrorizing of African American communities in a number of its poems, including one in which she describes discussing with her black nanny, as an adult, the details of her divorce:
She nods at how I answer her questions:
I left the man; he got the children.
She inclines her head to signify us two
in the long story of women and children
severed. With a nod she declares us
not guilty, and begins to give advice.
Her sibilant words I scarcely understand,
delta language, her a child on a plantation
talking to her own people, Mr. John Ed’s land.
(Did she talk to the child before memory?
Did the child understand?) What I hear is
the slash of machete on cane, a heavy sack
dragging through the sand, the thud of a gun,
dead bone at the spine, and a voice crying,
Her children cry out to her, but which ones?
The words I salvage are few, fierce, clear:
Bind them to you, bind them while you can.57
Pratt draws a parallel between her own experience of losing her children and the systemic theft of children from mothers under slavery (“signify us two / in the long story of women and children / severed), but she does so in a way that recognizes the crucial differences between their experiences. The middle section, in which Pratt recognizes a “delta language” she cannot fully comprehend, suggests the incommensurability of their experiences while still recognizing a common source of oppression under white heteropatriarchy. She communicates the difference through images of experiences she doesn’t share (“the slash of the machete on cane,” “the thud of a gun”), allowing her to make connections without erasing the specificity of difference. She respects her distance from African American dispossession but doesn’t render it inscrutable (as June Arnold would do, famously, at the end of Sister Gin when she makes several attempts to speak in the voice of an African American servant and then concludes that she cannot do so as a white writer58). The African American character in Pratt’s poem issues a clear imperative, “Bind them to you while you can,” which gives her both agency and authority.
This is the only poem in which Pratt explicitly links her own experience with African American dispossession, but it serves to anchor this collection that explores Pratt’s betrayal by both those closest to her and the law that declares that her existence as a lesbian mother is “against nature.” Her understanding of the dominant narrative that brands her a deviant erupts in several poems but gets its most explicit telling in the final poem, “Crime against Nature,” which pushes back against Alabama’s antisodomy law by suggesting that it is the state’s disciplining of “sexual deviants,” not the “deviants” themselves, that is “against nature”:
The ones who fear me think they know who I am.
A devil’s in me, or my brain’s decayed by sickness.
In their hands, the hard shimmer of my life is dimmed.
I become a character to fit into their fictions,
someone predictable, tragic, disgusting, or pitiful.
If I’m not to burn, or crouch in some sort of cell,
at the very least I should not be let near children.…
But what about my mother? Or
the man I lived with, years? How could they be so
certain I was bad and they were not.…
I left
certainty for body, place of mystery. They acted
as if I’d gone to stand naked in a dirty room, to spin
my skin completely off, turn and spin, come off skin,
until, under, loomed a thing, scaly sin, needle teeth
like poison knives, a monster in their lives who’d run
with the children in her mouth, like a snake steals
eggs.
I’ve never gotten used to being their evil,
the woman, the man, who held me naked, little and big.
No explanation except: the one who tells the tale
gets to name the monster. In my version, I walk
to where I want to live. They are there winding
time around them like graveclothes, rotten shrouds.
The living dead, winding me into a graveyard future.
Exaggeration, of course. In my anger I turn them
into a late-night horror show. I’ve left out how
I had no job for pay, he worked for rent and groceries,
my mother gave me her old car. But they abhorred me:
my inhuman shimmer, the crime of moving back and forth
between more than one self, more than one end to the story.59
Pratt’s indictment of the intimate violence of her interpellation as a “crime against nature” draws on a number of discourses, including popular horror films (zombies), Christianity (demonic possession), and medical diagnoses (sickness). She also recognizes her own complicity in demonizing the oppressor. But ultimately, her crime is insisting on “uncertainty,” on a multiplicity of selves without clear boundaries and set endings. It is this embrace of uncertainty at the heart of Pratt’s intersectionality that makes it distinctive. If this is a version of identity politics, then that identity is flexible, changeable, coalitional, and dynamic, bringing out unexpected alliances and, perhaps, transformational politics.
The same belief in the transformative potential of intersectional alliance fuels Maureen Brady’s novel Folly. Brady, a Tennessee native, was involved with Spinsters Ink, wrote for Sinister Wisdom and Feminary, and corresponded with the Feminary collective. While working on Folly, Brady wrote to Minnie Bruce Pratt, explaining why she wanted to set the book in the South: “It is, I guess about my adolescence and that was spent in the South, and I want to write about black/white relations, beginning awareness in the way it comes to you in the South as that’s the way I knew it. Also about the strength of chains of women in the South.”60 Brady asked for extensive details about working in a factory and asked if she could “talk to someone on a sewing line” and “get inside and spend some time observing.”61 Pratt volunteered to introduce her to Mab Segrest’s “landlady in Hurdle Mills [who] worked in a hosiery mill for years and tells wonderful stories.”62 The resultant research grounded Folly in the experiences of southern working-class women.
Though many lesbian feminist southerners consider the role of class in their narratives, few focus explicitly on labor issues, which makes Brady’s Folly a rarity in the archive of southern lesbian feminism. The women of Victory Mills support parents and children, enduring speed-ups and constant surveillance as they labor under the interpellating eye of a foreman known colloquially as Fartblossom, until the fateful day they have had enough. One of their coworkers, Cora, has left her sick baby to go to work (because the mill has no sick days or family leave policy), and the baby dies. When a daughter calls frantically to tell the mother, the foreman calls the police and then sends Cora home to be arrested for negligence. Folly, a single mother of two, is outraged, and she and several others confront him:
“What right you got stealing our break?” Folly asked. “What right you got callin’ the cops on Cora? What right you got makin’ her come to work when her kid was sick? Answer me that?” …
“Every one of us has to come to work every single night whether our children are sick or not, or you wouldn’t keep us on,” Martha said, “And you know it.” …
“We ought to have time off even if there’s no pay for it so nobody’s got to run off and leave a real sick baby so’s they don’t lose their job. I know’d Cora since the first grade ‘til now. Went all the way through school with her, sitting next to her most of the time because of our last names falling together. She didn’ do nothin’ the rest of us wouldn’t have done. Ain’t no fairness in you calling the law out on her. Law ought to be called out on you.” It was Shirley White who made this speech and made it clear from the back of the room where her machine was located right next to Cora’s empty one.… Every eye was on Fartblossom. Every woman could feel the others’ feelings and Shirley had spoken their mind.63
Folly’s bravery prompts many other women in the room to ask questions, and a collective outrage gathers force to a dramatic conclusion:
Shirley’s voice came clear from the back again. “You ain’t answered our questions, Mr. Blossom.” She made the Mr. Blossom sound real polite.
“I’ve no intention to,” he said.
“I’ve no intention to go back to my machine then,” Folly said. They looked over at Martha. So many times they had talked this out on the way home and said all the things they would say just before walking out on Fartblossom. Now Folly didn’t feel she had anything more to say and Martha didn’t look like she did either. Martha just nodded and made the first step toward the door. Folly followed. Emily had been standing behind them all along. She followed Folly, but Folly still wasn’t sure Emily wasn’t going back to her machine until she went right past it. A couple more women stepped out from the first row and made a single file line behind Emily. Folly couldn’t believe it. She thought maybe she hadn’t heard Fartblossom declare second break or something. The way people exit from a church they were getting up, one right after the other and falling into line. She didn’t dare turn around to see what she knew was happening. There was silence except for the sounds of feet walking until they got past the door, and then there was everyone talking at once.64
After this dramatic Norma Rae moment, the real work of the novel begins. The workers must contend with the shenanigans of management in collusion with the legal system, and even with the patriarchal cluelessness of the union organizer, who drops family leave policies at the last moment without their knowledge. The entire system is against the empowerment of working-class women, and this narrative is aware of that fact without making it the central focus of the novel.
The central drama of Folly turns on the problem of individual agency within collective action and empowerment. Sexuality is one key fulcrum—Folly’s relationship with her friend and neighbor Martha, which becomes sexual over the course of the strike, is paired with Folly’s daughter Mary Lou’s burgeoning friendship with the lesbian butcher Lenore, demonstrating the complicated negotiation of love, desire, and identity. But it is overcoming the barrier of racism in this small southern town that becomes most crucial for the success of the women of Victory Mills. The white characters are forced to confront the ways they have allowed themselves to be willfully ignorant of their own privilege, meager though it is in their working-class existence, and both mother and daughter must face it and unlearn it. The ultimate betrayal of the union by the male union organizer leads the women to a radical solution: they decide to run their own factory, without management—an anarchist/socialist fantasy in which workers own the means of production and govern themselves. Given the real history of nonunion labor in the South, the novel is utopian, but the careful consideration Brady gives to economic and racial issues makes it a model of intersectional feminism in a region not known for utopian solutions.
The works of Segrest, Pratt, and Brady are important both for the archive of southern lesbian feminism and for the way they complicate larger narratives of the evolution of feminism and lesbian feminism during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was the era that saw the publication of some of the most famous critiques of the whiteness of lesbian feminism, including Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, and All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, but Some of Us Are Brave. These works are still cited in evidence of the racism of lesbian feminism. Even Barbara Grier’s attempts to broaden her own publishing vision of lesbian feminism into a multicultural space with the publication of Ann Allen Shockley, Anita Cornwall, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor did not gain wide currency; Julie Enszer suggests that Naiad’s publications represented an older, civil rights version of activism (rather than the emerging coalition of women of color), and women of color increasingly wanted control over their own publications and venues.65 So one might assume that the Feminary collective—dominated by southern white lesbian feminists—was similarly criticized, but it was not. Indeed, the archived letters and published writings of Mab Segrest and Minnie Bruce Pratt indicate that they had close relationships with Barbara Smith, Cheryl Clarke, and others now remembered primarily in the “women of color critique.” Segrest wrote about the importance of her network of lesbian feminists: “The larger, vibrant lesbian writers’ movement (the clitterati, one friend joked) gave me a diverse, expanded circle of friends, people like Barbara Smith at Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press; Cherrie Moraga, Dorothy Allison and Elly Bulkin at Conditions, a New York lesbian magazine; Lou Blackdykewoman from South Carolina. Black, working-class white, Jewish, Chicana—they were my new queer cousins, with whom I was determined to keep faith.”66 The correspondence from the archives bears out this notion of “queer cousins.” Segrest and Pratt had extensive correspondence with Moraga and Lou, initially through their work for Feminary and later in independent friendships on their own. Barbara Smith, whose impatience with Barbara Grier was well known, felt close enough to Pratt that she shared details of some of the interracial rivalries with other lesbian feminists of color.
This understanding of the interconnections of sexism, racism, and homophobia was broadly embraced in a 1980s lesbian feminist culture that continued to include southern lesbian feminists. The feminist journal Conditions, started by four white lesbian feminists, focused its fifth issue on African American writers including southerners Ann Allen Shockley and Pat Parker. That issue, Julie Enszer maintains, had enormous influence, selling out two print runs (10,000 copies) and inspiring the publication of a number of germinal essay collections listed above. It also led to the transformation of the Conditions collective into a multicultural collective that featured Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, and Dorothy Allison.67
Enszer’s study of Conditions led her to conclude that “feminist investments in racial-ethnic formations were successful as a means of interrogating power and creating organizations to transform power relations between white women and women of color, institutionally and interpersonally. The story of Conditions highlights the possibilities that feminists imagined and created for multicultural, transformative, and visionary activism in the production of print culture.”68 Equally notable was the inclusion of Dorothy Allison, who more a decade later would become a startling “new” voice in literary fiction. Allison’s development as a writer was tied up more broadly in the feminist movement, but her experience at Conditions was decisive. Working with other serious writers like Jewelle Gomez and Cheryl Clarke gave her role models, and Conditions provided early readers of her work. The collective’s racial and regional diversity was sometimes uncomfortable for Allison; as she said in an interview, “I mean I was suddenly working with Yankee black women, and they looked at me like, Who is this cracker? And I’m like, Ooh, they’re going to eat me alive.”69 But the political coalitions and close friendships created new means of activism and identification.
What is notable is how important the contribution of southern lesbian feminists was to the wider investigation of gender and race in 1980s feminist movements. Pat Parker continued to be an inspiration, Ann Allen Shockley continued to publish in available venues, Mab Segrest, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Cris South (of the Feminary collective) added their voices, and Dorothy Allison evolved and grew through these multiple encounters. That race was inseparable from gender was not news to any of these southern women, black or white, and their versions of radical politics were always informed by this fact. But it also suggests a more complicated coalitional feminism than we often acknowledge. Personal relationships and explicitly antiracist activism made such coalitions possible and suggested that whatever critique of feminism these pioneers were articulating, it was from within a lesbian feminist community in which they were still invested.
Popular Translations of the Radical South
In addition to the discussions about intersectional politics that happened in independent lesbian feminist presses and periodicals in the 1970s and 1980s, there were also conversations about the radical South erupting for readers more interested in entertainment than in political instruction. In 1982 Ann Allen Shockley published Say Jesus and Come to Me as a paperback original with Avon, a paperback press.70 The novel features a (closeted) black lesbian preacher, Myrtle Black, who proposes an interracial women’s march to protest the ongoing problem of prostitution in the city; almost immediately, white feminists attempt to coopt her vision for their own benefit—and to use her as a token black woman in their campaign. Shockley is unsparing in her depictions of white women’s cluelessness, but she also allows for the possibility of cross-racial partnerships, as long as white women confront their own misconceptions in the process. Shockley believes that the black church, especially its queer membership, both male and female, needs to be the driving force behind such movements in the South.
In one of the novel’s telling debates, a San Francisco organizer, Rita, insists on making the march explicitly feminist. “We need to put it in the political logistics of the overall Women’s Movement,” she argues. “Focus attention on the oppression of women by male patriarchs. Bring to the forefront woman power—the power to control our lives, our bodies, our identities, as well as the destruction of sexism in our institutions!”71 Myrtle considers Rita a zealot whose speech is reminiscent of the “Black Movement’s once fiery oratory, a movement whose eloquence was now reduced to ashes without even the heat of the flames” (129). She replies, “I am against sexism.… But my plan was simply to march against crime, corruption, and vice in the city. A moralistic concept” (129). The contrast of “moralistic” and “feminist” frames the tensions of the exchange. Elsewhere in the novel, many black women refuse to align themselves with the feminist movement because it is perceived to be a white woman’s trivial pastime. When Myrtle asks an organizer about “black feminists,” she replies, “What black feminists? … This is the South.… The word feminist was anathema. It antagonized the black men, and men are important to black Southern women, you can believe it! To top that, they equate the word feminist with man-haters, white women, and lesbians. And like wow! Lesbians are something that can’t be dealt with in the black community—queers and funny people” (133). This attitude leads Myrtle both to insist on a “moralistic” focus for the march and to hide her own lesbianism—at least, until the final scene of the novel.
Myrtle encourages feminist organizers to recognize how different their experiences are: “As a black woman,” Myrtle said icily, “I know about oppression, being victimized by racists and sexists alike. I catch it from black women who are prime endorsers of black male chauvinism, white sexists and racist women. I know all about oppression!” (130). And she will not allow white feminists to coopt her leadership: “As the one who conceived this idea and as a minister, I am going to insist that there be moralistic and humanitarian objectives. We must not lose sight of intrinsic human values” (130). This model of faith-based feminist activism can be used to build a coalition that could, the novel suggests, transform politics in urban spaces in the South.
Say Jesus and Come to Me couches its radical politics in a romantic love story between Myrtle Black and an R & B singer, Travis Lee. The melding of radical politics with the emerging genre of lesbian romance meant that happy endings muted some of the intensity of the political critique, making it, perhaps, less radical. Naiad was stepping up production of lesbian romance and other genre fiction in the 1980s when it reprinted Say Jesus and Come to Me in 1987; another of its releases that set romance in the radical South was Catherine Ennis’s South of the Line. Ennis, whose real name was Hobby Van der Weyden, was a member of a women’s artist collective in rural Louisiana who wrote several novels for Naiad Press in the 1980s in a variety of genres (speculative, romance, mystery).
Plantation stories are ripe with homoerotic subtext, as Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations discusses at length.72 South of the Line may be the most explicitly queer plantation romance ever written. Dashing plantation mistress Dominique first appears as she is winning a horse race, in “men’s clothing, filthy breeches, a rough white shirt open at the throat, rolled up at the sleeves, and mud-caked, scuffed boots. A long black pigtail escaped from under her faded, floppy hat.”73 Dominique makes quick work seducing Faith, her poor cousin from Illinois: “She lay on me, her tongue at first tentative as she tried to match its movement to the surging of my hips. Then the fire caught her and we were joined, as one, our mouths wet, warm, moving together.”74 Unlike most lesbian romances, which invent obstacles to the lovers’ union, Ennis puts the lovers in bed together within the first thirty pages. The sex/romance is a hook to get the reader interested in Ennis’s revisionist version of the radical South: Faith discovers that her beautiful, seductive plantation mistress lover is working for the Underground Railroad; she is, in fact, a “race traitor” who passes as a member of the white supremacist elite to undermine the system. Ennis upends the tropes of abolitionist literature that treats southern whites as the villains and northern abolitionists and slaves as the heroes/heroines, and plantation romances in which northern brides come south and are converted to the superiority and wisdom of southern ways. Here, the Yankee “bride” comes south and is seduced by the glamorous plantation mistress, which leads not to an embrace of the peculiar institution but to Faith’s conversion to abolition and activism. In Illinois she had been pro-Union but not engaged with questions of slavery or equality; in Tennessee she becomes an active agent of abolition.
Dominique takes escaped slaves north with Henry, the husband of her half sister Malissa, a freed slave; the couple pass as slaves in Dominique’s household as they subvert the plantation hegemony. But Faith doesn’t discover this until long after her seduction by Dominique, when they are attempting to reach New Orleans by riverboat and are put ashore to make their own way by land. After they are menaced by pirates and saved by their alliance with a poor, illiterate woman named Blest, who gives Faith a gun, they meet a group of ordinary white farmers who feel no loyalty to the Confederacy: “‘I don’t aim to get into any fighting,’ the man said adamantly.… ‘I ain’t got time to shoot at no Federals ’less they get bothersome. Live and let live.’ He often saw blue uniforms on the road but they had not disturbed him or his crop. He and his family were isolated, close to, but out of the political turmoil. They were Southerners, yes, but uninterested in the Confederacy’s claim to sovereignty, probably not even sure what the word meant.”75 Victoria Bynum’s research about Jones County’s resistance to the Confederacy resonates in this passage that suggests that the Confederacy was a creation of the planter class that had little relevance to other southerners.76
Ennis also shows us the complexity of African American experiences in the South. Henry and Malissa establish a haven for free blacks in New Orleans; as Dominique explains to Faith: “ ‘There were thousands of free blacks in New Orleans then,’ she began again. ‘Many of them owned homes and businesses and some were land-owning farmers. And Malissa had cousins there. So she and Hank and Henry moved to New Orleans, too, and they were more my family than my grandparents. You see, even if they weren’t proud of it, Malissa was their grandchild, too.… I love Malissa. She’s my sister and my dearest friend and we’ve been together all my life.’ ”77 This portrait of New Orleans as a refuge from the racist hegemony becomes a backdrop to their own escape to freedom—south, instead of north.
It is significant that it is a lesbian seduction, by a woman who wears men’s pants and a shirt without a bra, that leads to Faith’s political radicalization. In these tales of the radical South, lesbian desire is the gateway drug, so to speak, for other transgressions. That fundamental difference leads to sympathy with other differences and to coalitions among the many southerners who are opposed to the nostalgic white supremacist version of the South that still dominates political discourse and popular culture.
It is interesting that Catherine Ennis—a Louisiana native and resident who wouldn’t use her own name on her books and wouldn’t do readings too close to home, so as not to be recognized—should construct this version of southern history that dramatically rewrites the meaning of southern identity and southern heroism. It speaks to the need for southern lesbian feminist writers to create a usable past, a genealogy of their South, in which even those timid about radicalism can feel at home.
Consider one of the most popular writers discussed in this study, one most southern readers still don’t know is a lesbian. Fannie Flagg was never an activist and certainly never a radical. Her career was built on her likeability and her unchallenging southernness and femininity, and in spite of her relationship with the famous lesbian and feminist activist Rita Mae Brown, she has maintained that reputation. When Fried Green Tomatoes was released as a movie, Flagg resolutely refused to identify her characters, much less herself, as gay. So she may seem a strange choice to conclude this chapter about the radical South, but Flagg’s writing is marked by an often radical deconstruction of identity categories thought to be fixed and unchangeable in the South, and her undogmatic, entertaining stories make these radical transgressions seem like the most natural thing in the world.
The ongoing legacy of southern lesbian feminists’ radical South can be seen in Flagg’s 2010 novel I Still Dream about You, a love letter to Birmingham, Alabama. Flagg’s story follows Maggie Fortenberry, a blond former Miss Alabama who decides to kill herself but can’t seem to free herself from her myriad social obligations in order to do the deed. This dramatic situation provides the opportunity to introduce, through Maggie, a host of southerners who don’t fit traditional definitions of conservative southerners. As the book jacket puts it, “Maggie discovers, quite by accident, that everybody, it seems, has at least one little secret.”78
Indeed, one of the charms of this novel is the way that Flagg holds back specific details that are usually considered defining; structuring categories of identity are folded in casually, after the reader has formed an attachment to a particular character. We learn that Hazel, the boss at Red Mountain Realty, is a brilliant businesswoman—and a little person; that Brenda is a treasured friend, an African American, and a lesbian (or at least had a lesbian affair in college); and that blonde, perfect Maggie had a years-long relationship with a married man, a fact she is ashamed of, and which, along with the rejection of her childhood sweetheart, makes her want to end it all.
Contending with difference is a struggle for every member of the team. When Brenda meets Hazel, she asks Ethel, “Does she know she’s a midget?”79 This prompts an awkward exchange: “ ‘Why, no,’ said Ethel, never looking up. ‘But I’m sure if you want to go back in and tell her, she’ll be delighted to know why she’s so short.’ ‘Oh no … I didn’t mean it that way[.…] What I meant was that she acts just like a real person.… Oh […] I’m not saying she’s not a real person. It’s just […] well […] she didn’t sound like a midget on the phone[.…] I thought they all had funny little voices like the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz or something” (59; author’s ellipses in brackets). Flagg’s tone here is humorous but not satiric; Brenda’s discomfort doesn’t mark her as bigoted, but simply uninformed. This attitude runs through most of the novel; difference is both important and inconsequential, and the characters have a sense of humor about their own identities. At one point, Brenda and Hazel joke about their shared minority status:
Brenda had such a good sense of humor about herself—a trait you more or less had to have if you worked for Hazel. Brenda and Hazel had a lot in common on that score. In Brenda’s lifetime, she had gone from being Colored to Negro to Black, and now African American, and it was a running joke between them. Hazel would come in the door and ask Brenda how she was feeling today, and Brenda would say, “Well, I felt very black yesterday, but today I’m feeling a little colored. How about you?” Hazel would think and say, “I think I’m feeling a little more short-statured than height-challenged today.”
Brenda always said to the new people, when they were surprised at some of Hazel’s humor, “She may not be politically correct, but she’s hired more minorities than any other company in town.” (70)
Flagg’s creation of a multicultural haven at Red Mountain Realty balances the importance and the irrelevance of differences. Hazel is everyone’s best friend, the most fun and charming person in the office. Ethel is a diehard white conservative who watches Fox News and can’t stand Obama, but she loves Brenda and congratulates her after the 2008 election. Although her sister was traumatized in a Birmingham civil rights demonstration, Brenda loves her coworkers; she and the former Miss Alabama are best friends. Political differences have no deleterious effect on the “beloved community” that Red Mountain Realty represents.
Maggie is allowed to be both sympathetic and clueless in relation to southern racism. She is shocked by the Birmingham protests: “This was not the Birmingham she lived in. She had never heard her parents or anyone she knew say an unkind word against black people.… She had been told that they preferred to be with their own” (83). Her cluelessness about the roots of southern racism would not have survived even one issue of Feminary, yet Flagg softens her critique of Maggie and, by extension, of well-meaning, shocked white southerners who might be reading the novel. Maggie can love her friend Brenda, and recognize that racism was worse than she knew, and still long for the good old days; both southern nostalgia and a multicultural present are valued in I Still Dream about You. Flagg celebrates the progress that would allow Brenda to run for mayor: “The way things were changing so fast, anything could happen. A black woman from Birmingham had already been America’s secretary of state, and Regina Benjamin, a black woman from southern Alabama, had just been named surgeon general of the United States” (227). And yet, Flagg notes that “progress had not come without a price” (227), and immediately shifts to the harassment of Maggie at the Miss America pageant for being a white southerner. This equation of two kinds of prejudice unifies southern identity, black and white, against “outside agitators” in a way that is unthinkable to white supremacists and antiracist activists.
That radical South of the present extends back into a southern past. When Brenda and Maggie discover a corpse in the attic of a grand estate they are selling, they uncover a secret: Edward Crocker, a scion of Birmingham industry, one generation removed from Scottish indentured servitude, was a woman who passed as a man. With this plot turn, Flagg is able to explore feminist themes directly. “As Edward, the son, she’d had total control of her own life.… When he had championed women’s causes, he had not been dismissed as just another emotional female. When Edward had ordered men about, they had not balked at receiving orders form a woman. And her life had not been without fun. She and Lettie had laughed over the years, picturing the faces of men: if they had only known a female was running one of the largest companies in the world and had bested most of them at golf” (297). Edward Crocker becomes, in Flagg’s telling, a kind of feminist activist, disproving all misogynist assumptions. That Edward/Edwina was able to pass as a man without surgery or hormones suggests a willing suspension of disbelief that is essential in Flagg’s oeuvre. In Flagg’s fictional universe, race, gender, and sexuality are unfixed, malleable, and ultimately unimportant.
Such cavalier erasures of racial and gender differences and easy resolutions of the divisive politics of the contemporary South are possible only, perhaps, in the happy, quirky South of Flagg’s imagination. And even in that world, Flagg is not convinced that everything needs to be discussed publicly. When Brenda and Maggie reveal their secrets to each other—that Maggie had been involved with a married man, and Brenda had an affair with a married woman—they agree to keep these secrets to themselves:
She looked over at Maggie and said, “Well, then … now that both our cats are out of the bag, like the song says, ‘Tain’t nobody’s business but our own,’ right?”
“Right.”
“Life is hard enough. I say everybody deserves at least one little secret, don’t you think?”
“I do.” …
They both smiled all the way home. I was so good to have a best friend. (304)
This implicit repudiation of the “come out” mantra of gay liberation extends far into the past, as Maggie considers the talk that revealing Edward’s secret would bring: “Anything involving someone’s sexual life (dead or alive) was fodder for the worst kind of titillation and gossip, and his life would wind up being just another amusement for people to speculate about” (313). So she decides to keep his secret as well.
Flagg’s insistence on the dignity of the closet is maddening, considering the chances taken by her fellow southern lesbians decades before. But Flagg is doing more than she lets on here; while her characters don’t know the full complexity of the radical South, the readers do. No secrets are ever actually kept in the novel. And when she creates an impossibly happy ending for all her characters (including a surprise million-dollar legacy), she makes the black lesbian Brenda the new mayor of Birmingham—as radical a premise as any that southern lesbian feminists have imagined. Flagg depicts a world that contemporary political discourse would have us believe is impossible in the South, in a wildly popular novel that has reached many, many more readers than the brilliant analyses in Feminary. That this vision is both romantically idealistic and often accurate is Fannie Flagg’s peculiar genius. In the end, as a fictional creation of the archive of southern lesbian feminism, the radical South is both transformative and entirely unremarkable.